As people amass digital content and the cost of electronic storage continues to decline, digital content is increasingly hosted and consumed on a variety of devices (often referred to as endpoints), including but not limited to servers, personal computers, hand-held computers, portable phones, personal digital assistants, in-vehicle devices, and home entertainment devices.
Portable devices, which are generally equipped with connectivity features that allow communication over networks, have become immensely popular. Although electronic storage capacities of portable devices are increasing, they are still dwarfed by hard drive storage capacities available on servers, PCs, and other types of consumer electronics equipment. As such, portable devices are not generally used to store the majority of a person's digital content. In addition, certain digital content is protected by the intellectual property rights of others, and its use may be restricted in various ways.
There is a growing need for platforms and techniques that effectively allow people to use portable devices to remotely access digital content that is stored in various other endpoints in flexible, legal, and generally network-independent manners.